to elements in the text that would possess the same emotional impact for the author and the reader. There is, however, a
tendency to think of the "objective correlative"-whether the structure of a play or the metaphors embedded in it--as somehow eliciting an automatic reponse from the presumably passive reader.If that were true, the reading of a poem or of a Shakespeare play would be analogous to responding to a red traffic light. Any reading is far more complex than such a simple stimulus-response situation. In information theory, the listener is said to have "decoded" the "message" when he has reconstructed the sounds and has recognized the patterns of words. This view is understandable when it is recalled that information theory is concerned with such matters as the transmission of utterances over, for example, the
telephone. But, of course, workers in this field are quite ready to admit that in any actual communication, the process must be carried through to an interpretation of meaning. And even on the level of recognizing the sounds, evidence exists to demonstrate that the listener's present expectations and past experience are important. For example, Cherry (1957) reports experiments which reveal that once a listener is aware of the general subject matter of an utterance, he is more likely to recognize the words in spite of distorting interference or "noise." If what the listener brings to even this simple level of listening is important, how much more necessary is recognition of the importance of what the reader brings to a text. The matrix of past experience and present preoccupations that the reader brings to the reading makes possible not only a recognition of shapes of letters and words but also their linkage with sounds, which are further linked to what these sounds point to as verbal symbols. This requires the sorting out of past experiences with the words and the verbal patterns in different contexts. The readers of the quatrain demonstrated very clearly that, whatever the "model," the reading of a poem is not a simple stimulus-response situation. There was not simple additive process, one word-meaning added to another. There was an active, trial-and-error, tentative structuring of the responses elicited by the text, the building up of a context which was modified or rejected as more and more of the text was deciphered.